2 Weeks Later, Tuesday. 14:15 Lounge

Unlike the previous years, each final for a senior was scheduled. The cadets couldn’t take them in their preferred order. Or in John’s case all of them in a day or two. This was highly frustrating for John and his group of friends.

In truth, the main reason to do this is to keep the cadets on campus. Saturday was commencement, where attendance was mandatory. Then on Sunday, the cadets would receive their orders officially and when they shipped off to them.

Everyone in the lounge was done with two finals already. Theresa and Alice were absent since they were taking their third test at the moment. John looked annoyed, but not because he was studying. It was because the medical students got to take a second final today.

Andern looked like he was having a panic attack while working on an assignment. John heard him mumble something about a take-home portion of the final. His erratic and frantic behavior had caused Kevin and Thomas to stare at him. Which wasn’t helping Andern a bit.

John had enough and spoke up, “Dude, what the hell? You are giving me hives with this manic act you’re doing.”

“It’s not an act,” Andern mumbled as he stared at his assignment.

John pulled one data slate from Andern’s hands and swiped the other off the coffee table. Kevin and Thomas laughed at Andern’s delayed reaction. John ignored it and skimmed through the questions.

Andern whined pathetically, “Gimme it back.”

John shook his head and handed them back, “Your questions for one through five are right. Stop obsessing about making them more correct, you’ll actually end up making them wrong. You’re overthinking the complexity in the bottom five.”

Andern quickly looked at the data slate that contained the questions, then he flipped back to the one he was typing his answers into, “Fuck me. Thanks.”

“Jesus Christ man. You are unhinged,” Thomas said.

Nathan laughed, “Dumbass here was super happy about being in the top half of the class. One of our professors said ops cadets get a bonus ribbon for the top thirty percent of the class.”

“That ribbon is related to pay, isn’t it?” John asked.

“Sure is. Two hundred and fifty extra credits a month,” Nathan said, “This guy is already firmly in the top fifteen.”

Kevin snickered to himself, “Dumbass over here can get there if he does well in the finals?”

Nathan nodded, “He nailed the first two tests, and is in the top thirty percent now.”

“Top twenty-five percent, thank you very little,” Andern said as he worked on his homework.

“Cool,” John said

Andern looked up, “I don’t want to hear you give me any sass.”

“I wasn’t giving you any. Dunno why you didn’t apply yourself sooner though.”

Brian set a book down and leaned back in his chair, “What’s more surprising is that he is positioned where he’s at without applying himself.”

“Right? Like a bit more effort and you don’t have to work your ass off and hope, or count on, others failing,” John looked confused, “I don’t like counting on others to fuck up. When I do, they don’t fuck up. When I don’t care then that’s usually when I benefit from that.”

Kevin set his work down on the table, “My eyes bloody hurt. John’s right you know.”

“You are all assholes. I am not relying on anyone fucking up. That’s why I’m studying hard.”

“Good on you,” John said without a shred of sincerity.

“Hey John, what’s the odds of Terry screwing up?” Kristin asked.

John shook his head, “Well only missed three questions out of the first two tests. I’m not saying it’s impossible, but that third spot is going to be tough to get. Goes back to my theory on counting on people to mess up.”

“Dammit, I was really hoping to get in the top three.”

“Top four ain’t bad, especially with him and Patrice,” Jessica said.

“Patrice is a punk,” Andern said.

“He’s not a punk. An aristocratic asshole to be sure. He was born with a golden spoon, given everything he wanted or needed while growing up. But the truth of the matter is he’s damn smart and a highly competent soon-to-be officer,” John looked around at the room.

“Still a punk to me,” Andern grunted.

The room laughed. The laughter continued as Andern stumbled over explaining how there were different types of assholes. A quick break from the monotony and stress of studying was long overdue.

Wednesday. 08:15 Armstrong Atrium

It was bright in the atrium. The windows were letting in the warm rays from the sun. Classes were in session, but a lone cadet was wandering around aimlessly.

“I am so bored,” John said as he was looking around the atrium.

He sat down on a bench and just kind of stared at nothing. The final, Advanced Command Theory, was over. Two hundred and fifty questions took John only ten minutes. A trick question caused him to read and re-read the same question a couple of times.

An officer was walking down the corridor and spotted the very bored-looking cadet, “Excuse me, Cadet Lief, right?”

John looked up, “Yes sir.”

“Come with me.”

“Roger that,” John was hopeful that he would have something to do.

Unfortunately, during senior finals, they couldn’t leave campus. No leaves were approved, which annoyed John to no end because he was done with classes around this time each day, and then had nothing to do. Anything was preferable to sitting on his ass and watching TV.

“Uhm, where are we going sir?”

The unnamed lieutenant smiled as he turned back, “Junior command class. Today they are doing an experiment in a wargame. We needed to grab a couple more bodies for the attacking force.”

“That sounds pretty fun sir.”

“Can’t wait to see the hell you are going to raise with them.”

“It seems my reputation precedes me.”

The lieutenant laughed and then led John to a conference room. Several low-ranking officers and other employees in the building were huddled around several terminals. They all looked at the door when it opened.

“Dammit Simon, I told you more than…” Commander Ron Wilf began to shout before seeing the lone soul the lieutenant found, “Lief, you’ll do.”

“Sir, what am I doing exactly?”

“Extra credit, not that you’d need any of it. Take command of the CNS Geronimo.”

John smiled, “Ooh, a dreadnaught. So how hard do you want me to make it for them?”

The commander grinned, “Brutalize them.”

“With pleasure.”

John noticed this wargame was much different than the others. The players had five minutes to get their turns submitted. This led to some really janky orders. John, not ever wanting to be in a weaker position, loaded his VI onto the terminal.

“Eve, run unhinged hostility script. Target is the nearest batch of ships.”

A light blinked green on the screen. Hundreds of very specific orders were entered for John’s ship. Technically speaking, John wrote all of those orders, but his VI was doing all the typing for him, based on what patterns he wanted to run. The others in the room noticed that.

“Is that even fair?” A lieutenant commander asked as he typed away at the keyboard.

“Cadet, did you program the VI to come up with the orders, or did you enter the orders yourself?”

John stared at the screen and fine-tuned a portion of the order before responding, “I typed it all into the VI. I then categorized the orders. The extra subroutines I added to her allowed me to dump in large batches of orders without having to type them. I still have to review them, but it saves a hell of a lot of typing.”

“Skirting the line but he did type the orders.”

“And I’m ready to go,” John said as he locked the orders in.

Three minutes later the last person to confirm their orders had done so. The turn then initiated when the minute ticked over. The officers and employees were very tense, they didn’t want to lose. That they drafted him into this new kind of final was actually kind of fun for John. He was actually very interested in how his fellow junior cadets would act.

John watched the simulation. His ship jumped into real space danger close to three cruisers and a pair of frigates. It immediately went to red alert and engaged the hostiles. John had lucked out in a sense, two of the ships were transferring supplies to one another, while the other three were covering for them.

The part where he didn’t luck out was where two of the cruisers had a bead on John’s dreadnought with their railguns. Luckily the Berserker-class dreadnaught had multiple layers of kinetic shielding, along with ablative armor. Cruisers could eventually take one down, but it would take days of constant firing and evading attacks.

The quad railgun design of the Geronimo was a bit unfair, at least to the group of cadets he had run into. While the defending cruisers did in fact get the first shots off, all of their weapons were stopped dead in their tracks by the layered shielding arrays.

The first ship John had targeted fired a single four-round burst from the railgun. All of the shells flew through the cruiser’s kinetic shielding like a hot knife cuts butter. The first round didn’t pierce the armor but rent a deep gouge of the length of the cruiser. The damage didn’t last long, the other three rounds pierced the hull, with one striking the primary fusion core.

The second cruiser received fire from the dreadnaught’s plasma blast guns. The shielding held up longer, but the overwhelming fire that John was raining down on it eventually took out their engines. The crew was likely alive, but the ship was now a ballistic projectile.

The final cruiser in that battlegroup took a railgun shot as the brutish ship was brought about. It, like the first cruiser, stood no chance to defend against the counterattack. Two of the four slugs were partially deflected, though in doing so the slugs themselves tore off three large sections of armor plates. One of the slugs just missed the target, but the fourth pierced the forward armor plates and crashed through compartments, energy, and plasma conduits, and exited the ship by taking out a secondary drive cone.

The leaking plasma ignited within the ship and exploded in a bright blue animation on the screen. The frigates were equally helpless. They were docked with one another and were facing one another so their main gun, which was effectively a pea shooter in comparison to the behemoth attacking them, was rendered useless.

After dispatching the frigates, the optional commands were engaged. Missiles and torpedoes were reloaded. The close combat systems, which doubled for anti-air defenses, were also reloaded. Shielding, both kinetic and EM, was recharged before the ship jumped into slipspace.

John read the message, which indicated they had three minutes before orders could be made, looked up from his terminal, and spoke, “How petty do you want me to be?”

“Full send cadet.”

“Right-o,” John smiled.

He added a suicide attack command to the scripting. In the off chance that the ship becomes overwhelmed, then he’d overload the core, launch all fighters and bombers, and launch torpedoes and missiles from any functional launchers. The whole point was to make whatever victory against him as costly as possible.

It wasn’t quite as petty in a real-world sense though. A fusion explosion like that would atomize most, if not all, of the vessel and damage or destroy any ships within a frighteningly large radius of the explosion. But the key here was the destruction of the vessel. Very little to no intel would be gleaned from its corpse.

“What are you doing next cadet?” one of the other junior officers said.

“Long-range scans have a cluster of ships in the next system. I’m going to head there as quickly as possible and aggressively introduce myself to the ships.”

The timer counted down to zero. John activated his VI and activated a script to enter orders once more. This process repeated itself for the next forty-five minutes. He ended the wargame in an absolutely hilarious fashion.

Half of his shield arrays were damaged or not functioning at their optimal levels. All of his main weapon systems were functioning though. John had located the last group of fellow cadets who had formed an impromptu battlefleet.

The core of that hastily formed fleet was three battleships, with one being in pristine shape. John jumped in danger close once more. In fact, he jumped too close to the fleet and plowed into several of the escort vessels, damaging a portion of the forward ablative armor.

The initial onslaught caught the fleet unawares. John knew that the damage his ship wrought was overstated since the cadets couldn’t give them more clear or accurate orders to account for such a scenario. Nevertheless, he greeted the fleet with fire and brimstone.

The escort vessels fell, one after another, but the dreadnought’s close in combat systems was getting shredded and overloaded with the sheer number of targets to track. It didn’t take long for the EM shielding to completely fail. The kinetic shielding held for the first several volleys of rail fire it took.

Dreadnoughts aren’t specifically built to get up close and personal. But their defensive systems have always been overbuilt to handle ridiculous situations, though perhaps the creativity of those crafting those ideas should have a conversation with John.

The first battleship fell, but not before her railgun fried several kinetic shielding arrays of the dreadnought. One right was all it took to shut down about a third of the port side defensive guns. The enemy bombers abruptly changed course and began making attack runs on the undefended side. They made good with their attacks as they shattered the Geronimo’s ablative plates.

Normally, John would have submitted orders to have his ship roll over and keep the unguarded portions away from the enemy ships. In this case, though, the orders were simple, keep the giant railgun pointed at the enemies.

Every twenty-five seconds four rounds were fired. They meant death for someone, somewhere, and some time. John would’ve preferred all the railgun rounds to strike their targets but that isn’t a realistic expectation. His accuracy was excellent, due in no small part due to the proximity of the fleets.

But he was heavily outgunned and losing firepower by the simulated minute. John was grinning like a crazed idiot when his ship had received enough damage to enact his immolation program. His junior cadets would never have predicted that someone would willingly blow up a new dreadnought to eliminate a fleet.

“Holy hell, if I ever did that my name would go down in history as the most idiotic captain of a ship,” John said.

“Why do you say that,” the commander asked innocently.

“Boom,” John said with a smile as he pointed at the screen.

True to form the dreadnought launched as many torpedoes and missiles as possible. Chemical trails could be seen originating from the various tubes. Its guns continued to fire away, not giving one inch to the enemy. An enemy that was closing in for the kill.

The missiles and torpedoes either struck their targets or were shot down by the surviving fighters and smaller escort vessels. Then a bright flash of plasma erupted where the dreadnought’s central drive core was.

The dreadnought was no more. The blast wave of superhot plasma washed over and annihilated the rest of the fleet. None were left alive to savor a glorious victory over a dreadnought. Instead of celebrating a painful victory, every last one of them was annihilated by an overly aggressive captain with a death wish.

Or one that knew it was a game of sorts and could do some absolutely wild shit that he’d never be able to much less actually want to, try in real life. The officers in John’s room looked at him like he was mentally defective. But with that last spiteful action, the wargame was completed with no surviving cadets.

“Let’s head inside. I’m sure the professor would like to see who the maniac was,” the commander said as he gestured them toward the door.

“Man, that was fun,” John said as he stood up.

“Do you know how many rules you violated?” a lieutenant asked him.

“Surrounding engagements with dreadnoughts? All of them,” John grinned, “That’s the point though, it’s just a game. Our normal rules for engagement didn’t apply here, plus running into unexpected scenarios is a great way for people to learn.”

“What I’m hearing from you is that it’s ok to be a sociopath in wargames, but in real life that’s no good,” one of the other officers said as they walked through the door.

John just laughed to himself about that last comment. The line between the two has been blurred for his entire adult life, and likely will always remain that way. Thanks in no small part to Alice the boundary was much clearer to John, and the more side was one he preferred to stay on.

As the group entered the lecture hall scores of students could be heard complaining about a certain ship. John was grinning from ear to ear. Captain Jones, the professor of the class, knew with a brief look at the group of enemy combatants who commanded the dreadnought.

“Cadet Lief, good to see you once again. How was piloting the dreadnought?”

The room grew quiet instantly. It wasn’t another professor or staff member. It was one of their own, albeit a senior to them. Their moods shifted once more to being angry again, that he was this happy at what he did lit a fire in many of them.

John smiled, “It was the smile that gave it away, right?”

“Only you could be happy to pilot a ship that aggressively and suicidally reckless.”

“Yeah, that was so much fun. Basically, being able to do the very things that the rulebooks say we can’t do.”

“Name one, of an impressively long list I might add, things that you aren’t allowed to do in a ship like that.”

John looked around the classroom, “Well obviously a dreadnought floating about space by itself is a pretty damned dumb use of resources. So optimally I’d be in a fairly large fleet. Aside from that, the main thing is to not expose the dreadnoughts to danger. Jumping back into real space within five or ten kilometers of a hostile force is simply idiotic.”

One cadet stood up on the far side of the room, “Why even have something like that in this simulation? We had no hope of fighting it.”

Captain Jones looked over at John, “Would you care to answer that, Cadet Lief?”

“Cadet, sorry I can’t see your name from here, but why didn’t you form a fleet?”

“It’s not that easy,” the cadet got defensive.

“Yet did you try to form one?”

“No, because I thought this was a solo option.”

John responded instantly, “Did you ask for any clarifications?”

“No.”

“Expect the unexpected. If you can prepare for that, you are good. If you’re not prepared, then you can end up dead. Ask questions of your leadership, they want you to succeed as much as you want to.”

Captain Jones nodded, “Now it’s true that the unexpected happens at a frightening rate for Cadet Lief. But the gist of what he’s saying is that you need to be able to think outside of the box. Rules are there to protect things, but there are times where they need to be bent, but not broken, to survive or prepare for an encounter.”

“Captain if I may,” John said, “There was a fleet that was assembled that did effectively defeat me. Now had I jumped in at the optimal range, well over three hundred clicks away, the engagement would likely have been very different.”

“How so?” a cadet in the front row asked.

“Realistically I’d be able to chip away at the fleet until they decide to leave the engagement. Bomber drones and fighters would have a dual purpose in screening me from hostile missiles and drones. It would’ve been a less damaging affair on my end.”

A cadet in the back of the room stood up, “Would it really have tipped the scales in your favor that much?”

John nodded, “Well at or near the maximum effective range of the dreadnought’s heavy weapons is far outside of your fleet’s rail guns. My dreadnought contains about four times as many drones and manned interceptors than your entire fleet combined. Missile and torpedo stores also dwarf yours. A lone railgun salvo from my vessel annihilates anything less than a battlecruiser of yours.”

Captain Jones interrupted, “And it’s safe to assume that a battlecruiser would receive significant damage.”

“I might even go so far to imply that would happen with battleships. Shielding arrays don’t like to be violently taken down either.”

Another cadet then stood up, “Why not attack us using standard doctrine?”

John shrugged, “Not that often you can jump a dreadnought and get into a brawling fight,” John grinned, “And not get court-martialed or die from it.”

The other officers looked uncomfortable and shook their heads. The commander looked like he won a war and was going to be given a medal for his amazing leadership. It wasn’t much leadership really, he simply gave a cadet, who could display questionable ethics and moral decision making, free reign to do whatever the hell he wanted in a simulation. But mission accomplished nonetheless.

“It was good to see you again Cadet Lief, congratulations on your assignment,” Captain Jones looked upon John proudly.

“Thank you, sir.”

“Well, I’ve taken enough of your day. Thank you for assisting in our wargame,” Jones then turned to face his class, “Now let’s focus less on the mistakes and more on what was done right.”

The commander turned to face the others in the atrium outside of the lecture half, “Great work everyone. Cadet, thanks for taking time out of your day to help out.”

“It was my pleasure. It’s not every day that you can fly a dreadnought like a crazed madman. That was fun as hell.”

The other officers could do nothing but groan at that comment.